The Poetics of Everyday Abolition: A Love Language
(Originally published on December 28, 2022)
I am actively foraging, searching for possibilities, craving freedom and liberation.
Mushrooms excite me. Dandelions comfort me.
As visionary author adrienne maree brown preaches, a mushroom is a toxin-transformer and a dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread.
Mushrooms and dandelions create pockets of hope and radical possibility.
The unpredictability of growth and life opens up portals into the unknown, transcending time and space.
Abolition can be found within the canvas that is yet to be painted, the soil waiting to be fertilized, the sapling needing warmth and nourishment to grow. The tea that is still brewing, the simmering broth, the flower bud waiting to bloom, the caterpillar ready to metamorphose.
Abolition is not a means to an end; it is a pathway to new beginnings.
Abolition starts from within.
It starts from recognizing the oppressor that lives within all of us.
It starts from killing the cop in our heads and in our hearts.
Abolition is how we get free.
Abolition is not limited to defunding the police or closing down prisons. Abolition isn’t necessarily destructive, or a call to burn everything down to the ground. Abolition is about worldbuilding: imagining and creating radical worlds that are mutually thriving and sustainably empowering.
As abolitionist organizer and grassroots activist, Mariame Kaba, urges us to consider “when something can’t be fixed then the question is what can we build instead?”
Abolitionist visions are not inherently in response to oppressive practices and systems of harm. Liberatory dreams can exist outside the carceral nexus, with the obsolescence of death-making institutions.
Imagining worlds that are not created yet is the work of science fiction.
You might be wondering how abolition is relevant to you.
Audre Lorde reminds us that “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that lives in all of us.”
For starters, I think we need to assume responsibility for how we benefit from and participate in carceral logics and discourses. Understanding our own positionalities in relation to the carceral industrial complex is a step toward community accountability and transformative justice.
Abolitionist scholar and political activist, Angela Davis, prompts us to reflect on why we take prisons for granted. Why do prisons exist in the first place and why is it so difficult to imagine a society without prisons?
Whose safety is guaranteed by policing, surveillance, and incarceration? Whose freedom is denied? Whose humanity is stripped away?
The work of abolition requires us to abandon our obsession to control and predict outcomes, to knowing all the answers.
Abolition can be branded as utopian, and in some ways it even is. I see that as a strength, as academic scholar Saidiya Hartman reflects on how “so much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.”
I believe that the core of abolitionist dreams is seizing the freedom to create our own realities.
Engaging in abolitionist endeavors can bring up a lot of complex emotions: while anger, rage, and ferocity are valid and justifiable, let us not forget about love, joy, hope, warmth, and nourishment.
Abolition requires us to listen to our mind, body, and soul. It invites us to tap into the creative potential of our minds.
What if we all engaged in ways that sync with the beating of our hearts?
What would it mean to practice everyday abolition?
